Biohacking Morgan Meyer To cite this version: Morgan Meyer. Biohacking. The Handbook of Peer Production, Wiley, pp.211-224, 2021, 978-1-119- 53709-0. hal-03147166 HAL Id: hal-03147166 https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03147166 Submitted on 19 Feb 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. This is the author’s version of a chapter accepted for publication in the Handbook of Peer Production. Changes resulting from the publishing process such as copy-editing, typesetting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. This author manuscript version is available for personal, non-commercial and no derivative uses only. Citation: Meyer, M. (2020). Biohacking. In: M. O’Neil, C. Pentzold & S. Toupin (Eds.), The Handbook of Peer Production (pp. 211-224). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 9781119537106 Available at: https://www.wiley.com/en-au/The+Handbook+of+Peer+Production-p-9781119537090 The Handbook of Peer Production Chapter 16 – Biohacking Morgan Meyer, Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (Mines ParisTech, PSL), France Chapter 16 – Biohacking 2 1. Introduction Over the past few years, a plethora of terms have emerged to describe scientific activities in the life sciences that happen outside traditional institutions: biohacking, garage biology, DIY biology, DIY genetics, DIY medicine, DIY science, and so on and so forth. These movements have attracted a growing number of enthusiasts, from young students to professional scientists, from artists to aspiring entrepreneurs, from people with no technological background to computer hackers. The diversity of people interested in DIY science has also generated a large diversity of activities: extracting DNA for genetic testing, producing bioreactors, creating fermentation kits (i.e. for homebrewing), doing bio-art projects, developing biosensors (i.e. to detect the presence of contaminants in the environment or in food), giving lectures and organizing workshops, and fabricating cheaper alternatives to scientific equipment. The DIYbio movement has become an object of interest for journalists, for museums and, occasionally, for decision makers. The DIYbio movement can also be of interest for people who analyze peer production since similar dynamics can be observed (i.e. the emphasis put on flat hierarchies, openness and decentralization). However, while peer production has become the subject of a large body of academic literature – analyzing for instance practices in the fields of computer software and hardware – the field of biology is usually not examined in this literature. In this chapter, I first provide an overview of the history, and the various practices of DIY biology. Thereafter I offer a few examples of DIY medicine. I then discuss and analyze some of the key issues of DIY biology: the openness of the movement (section 5), what the “yourself” in do-it-yourself stands for (section 6), and concerns with ethics and governance (section 7). The penultimate section of the chapter looks at the economic aspects and the valuations of DIY biology. In the conclusion, I Chapter 16 – Biohacking 3 will argue that further academic work could look into the geographies and fragilities/instabilities of DIY biology, and its relation with the public. 2. History The history of DIY biology is both a recent and a long one. In terms of its recent history, 2008 is usually mentioned as being its year of birth. The first DIYbio meeting took place in a pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the 1st of May of that year. Several months later, in February 2009, the Hackteria network was created, a network linking people interested in open source bio-art from countries such as the Czech Republic, Switzerland and several Asian countries. From 2009 onwards, stories such as those of Kay Aull, a student who managed to carry out a homemade test to detect hemochromatosis (a genetically transmitted disease that affects the metabolism of iron), became widely reported in the media. And in 2010, the Biopunk Manifesto was released by Meredith Patterson, one of the most visible members of the biohacking movement. But even before 2008/2009, terms such as “garage biology” and “DIY biology” began to circulate. In 2005, for instance, biologist Rob Carlson (2005: unpaged) predicted that “The advent of garage biology is at hand. Skills and technology are proliferating, and the synthesis and manipulation of genomes are no longer confined to ivory towers”. In 2006, biologist and computer scientist Attila Chsordash (2006, p. n.d.) wrote about “the coming world of personal biotech”, signifying that the “beautiful retro idea of tinkering with digital devices in a garage […] can be extended to biotech too”; he also used the term “bioDIY.” Among the first laboratories dedicated to DIY biology, we can mention BiologiGaragen in Copenhagen (2010), Genspace in New York (2010), Biocurious in Santa Clara (2010) and La Paillasse in Paris (2011). At the time of writing (September Chapter 16 – Biohacking 4 2020), the website diybio.org lists 109 groups across the world. Most of these groups are located in the Global North (40 in Europe, 42 in the US, 8 in Canada) with a smaller number in Asia (8) and in South America (6). Roughly half of these groups have created their own laboratories. Despite this recent history, the genealogy of DIY biology is more complex, and needs to be traced back in connection to various other developments within – but also outside – of science. First, as the term biohacking suggests, there is a close connection between biohacking and hacking. The connection is not only semantic but also ethical and philosophical: ideals such as openness, access, sharing, and decentralization are key principles in both fields. There is also a spatial proximity between these areas of practice. Numerous activities and groups did start off within already existing hacker labs. For example, in 2011 several DIY biology projects were launched at the MadLab in Manchester (created in 2008 - see Bell, Fletcher, Greenhill, Griffiths, & McLean, 2014) and there are numerous accounts of people, such as Berlin resident Lisa Thalheim, who moved from computer hacking to biohacking (Charisius, Friebe, & Karberg, 2013). This does not mean that there was an easy co-habitation. At the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, for instance, computer hackers complained about smells and were allegedly disgusted by the wet lab work carried out by DIY biologists (Charisius et al., 2013, p. 53). DIY biology is embedded within the larger peer production and open source movements that have developed since the 1990s. DIY biology is not the only field that has roots in the hacking and open source movements: open source agriculture (Chance & Meyer, 2017), open source ecology (Thomson & Jakubowski, 2012), and open source architecture (see Parvin, 2013) are other examples. The rise of DIY biology is also closely connected to the maker movement and the magazine MAKE which have Chapter 16 – Biohacking 5 provided a “hospitable” forum (Tocchetti, 2014, p.136). The maker movement, in turn, can be linked to the do-it-yourself tradition, that developed from the 1950s and 1960s onwards (including dedicated magazines, books, shops and TV shows). Some DIY biologists have also been involved in setting up the Gathering for Open Science Hardware in 2016 and, thereafter, the launch of the Journal of Open Hardware in 2017. Apart from these links to hacking, making and open source, there is also a connection between DIY biology and synthetic biology. The vision promulgated by synthetic biology – that engineering principles can be applied to biology in order to create new substances or organisms – has been influential. Numerous founders of DIY biology laboratories have met at the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition for students in synthetic biology. Some of the key features of the iGEM competition – a mix between entrepreneurial spirit, fun, team-work, reflections on ethical and social issues, and a positive attitude towards science – can also be found in DIY biology laboratories. However, until 2013, DIY biology laboratories were excluded from the competition – issues of security, responsibility and governance were put forward as the reasons. It was not until 2014 that a “community labs” track was opened at the competition in order to welcome projects from community laboratories. Finally, the rise of DIY biology can be placed within the longer history of the contribution of amateurs and citizens to science. Four examples can be mentioned here. A first example is what has been called popular epidemiology, “a process by which laypersons gather scientific data and other information, and direct and marshal the knowledge and resources of experts to understand the epidemiology of disease” (Brown, 1992). Second, AIDS treatment activists are also involved in the production and evaluation of biomedical knowledge (Epstein, 1995). In this case also, laypeople engaged in scientific practice and thus challenged the